278 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



and moved farther west to Alabama or Tennessee, there to begin 

 over again the process of " land killing " and then, perhaps, once 

 more desert their fields and settle on the virgin soils of Arkansas 

 or Texas. Of those who did not leave the older states, many 

 abandoned cotton culture. The cotton crop of 1860 showed an 

 increase of more than 100 per cent over that of 1850. But the 

 increase in the Atlantic coast states was only 44 per cent, while 

 in the western cotton states, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, 

 Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, the increase was over 153 per 

 cent. The crop of 1850 was about an average one for the dec- 

 ade 1851-1860. If we could compare by states the average 

 crops for the two decades, it is doubtful whether we would find 

 much, if any, increase in the production of the Atlantic states. 



While the value per acre of the occupied land in the older 

 states of the North was several times greater than in the new 

 states to the west of them, in the South directly the opposite of 

 this was true. In 1850 the occupied land in the Atlantic coast 

 states was valued at only $5.34 per acre, while that of the South- 

 western states was worth $6.26 per acre. " What are we to do in 

 South Carolina ? " wrote ex-Governor Hammond of that state in 

 1858. " But a small proportion of the land we now cultivate will 

 produce two thousand pounds of ginned cotton to the hand. It is 

 thought that our average production cannot exceed twelve hun- 

 dred pounds, and that a great many planters do not grow over 

 one thousand pounds to the hand. ... A great deal has been 

 said upon the improvement of our agricultural system. Neither 

 our agricultural societies nor our agricultural essays have effected 

 anything worth speaking of. And it does seem that, while the 

 fertile regions of the Southwest are open to the cotton planters, 

 it is vain to expect them to embark to any extent in improve- 

 ments which are expensive, difficult or hazardous. . . . Our cot- 

 ton region is too broad and our Southern people too homogeneous 

 for metes and bounds to enforce the necessity of improving any 

 particular locality." 



But the low prices and greater fertility of the western lands 

 were not the only reasons why the exhaustive system of land 

 cultivation continued at the South. The same opportunities for 



